“Start Quote

Maybe someone at the House of Representatives better think about their IT staff”

End QuoteJimmy WalesFounder of Wikipedia

The latest block comes after rogue edits were brought to light by a Twitter feed, @congressedits, which posts every change made from the government-owned address.

'Russian puppet'

One of the acts highlighted was an alteration to the page on the assassination of John F Kennedy, which was changed to say that Lee Harvey Oswald was acting "on behalf of the regime of Fidel Castro".

An entry on the moon landing conspiracy theories was changed to say they were "promoted by the Cuban government".

Another entry, on the Ukrainian politician Nataliya Vitrenko, was edited to claim that she was a "Russian puppet".

The biography of former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld was revised, describing him as an "alien lizard who eats Mexican babies".

One edit said the Cuban government was behind the murder of John F Kennedy

However the edit that finally brought administrators to ban anonymous edits from the House IP address was made on the entry for media news site Mediaite, describing the blog as "sexist transphobic" and saying that it "automatically assumes that someone is male without any evidence".

Mediaite had previously run a story on the rogue edits from congressional computers.

Counter productive?

Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, told the BBC that the incident did not surprise him, and vandalism has "always gone on and it always will".

The MediaIte entry on Wikipedia was edited to say the site was "sexist transphobic"

But he said that the @congressedits Twitter feed may have been counter-productive.

"There is a belief from some of the [Wikipedia] community that it only provoked someone - some prankster there in the office - to have an audience now for the pranks, and actually encouraged them rather than discouraged them."

He added: "Maybe someone at the House of Representatives better think about their IT staff - they might be hunting them down this very moment."

UK government edits

Earlier this year, the BBC discovered that the phrase "all Muslims are terrorists" was added to a page about veils by users of UK government computers.

One edit wrote that moon landing conspiracy theories were endorsed by Cuba

BBC links

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